English Listeners' Perception of Polish Alveopalatal and Retroflex Voiceless Sibilants: A Pilot Study

Abstract

This paper describes results from a series of brief pilot experiments exploring the perception of Polish alveopalatal and retroflex voiceless sibilants by native speakers of English. The goal of these experiments was to examine the suitability of a two-dimensional stimulus set for use in a series of training experiments. The stimulus set, consisting of CV syllables varying from alveopalatal to retroflex in two dimensions, fricative noise and vocalic cues, was created by modifying naturally produced tokens. Generally, English listeners were sensitive to distinctions in the stimuli on limited basis. Specifically, and unlike a native speaker of Polish, English listeners rely solely on vocalic dimension to categorize the stimuli and ignore fricative variation. However, with brief training, attention to that dimension was possible, with minor improvement.